Fear, Loathing, & Publishing

Home sweet home. That's what ahm talkin' bout, fucker!

Okay, so,  yeah, right, yes, it has been six months, that is, a million years, since I have posted. And, your point is? Heh. It's a champagne jam. That's what I'm talking about. Dang!

I'm tired. It's cold. I want to lay/lie down now. I'm frosty dammit!

Q: How do I know it was Sunday night?
A: Because I woke up at 3 a.m. on Monday morning unable to go back to sleep.

Anyway, just a quick note--for no small reason due to LiveJournal having just done one of its periodic things where it eats a post I just finished--to say that blogging is likely to go back to a weekly basis instead of daily. 

Note to self: don't buy dumbass girlie alcohol like this again!

I still remember the exact moment when I learned to love beer (and, by extension, acohol in general). Not that I hadn't been drinking plenty up to that point but until then it had been a necessary evil to revel in the moment of the true high party-ness. (Or something.) Anyway, I was at a buddy's dorm room on a bright sunny day and something--who really knows the details before after a momentous event itself?--but I remember turning up a full bottle of Michelob to kill it on the spot and to be able to choke it down I decided that with each gulp I would say "good" in my mind so that its drinking would just be a soothing whisper of "good" over and over again. And it worked: I was sold. By the end of that one bottle of beer I LOVED beer. Drink it all day. Drink it all night. No matter the consequences!

Anyway, all that aside, other than to establish my credentials as a serious drinker, today I did the stupidest thing at the liquor store. I was looking at rum and saw this lime-flavored Bacardi rum that was half the calories of regular rum. And, I'm like, shit, I got bad body image . . . why not drink smart (and hard) and do something good for my body? I was sold. Again. (See above. Michelob? My Gawd, what was I thinking/drinking?) Anyway, I kept looking for just regular Bacardi--that flavored shit is good for a few drinks but go too far and the next day you'll wake up with a 1/3 of a bottle of coconut-flavored rum that will take even you six months to get rid off--but couldn't find any. So I got the lime, thinking that woul be the least obnoxious flavor. Just as I got back out to the black job and cranked up Prodigy it dawned on that they probably cut the alcohol in half to get the calories in half. I looked at the bottle: goddamn if I wasn't right. So then it also dawned on me that the reason there was no 36 proof (as opposed to the standard 80 proof) regular Bacardi was that this stuff was flavored (and with half the calories) to sell to college girls that don't want to taste alcohol when they drink . . . and don't want to think that drinking too much is what might be making them gain weight. I felt like a rube. I felt like I'd been duped. The first thing I'm thinking is, fuck that, two shots per drink it is, maestro. But, then, I'm like, hey, why not get in touch with my inner college girl and just have some 75-cal drinks?  

You know, anything to help preserve my girlish figure.

To sleep or to die, that is the question.

Day Five of vacation begins with something of a whimper. My nose just keeps running which is finally beginning to make me think I have a cold or something as opposed to it being my ever-present allergies. Or, it could be the allergies given that the weather has been unseasonably warm. Anyway, vacation began as most of them do: I left work all wound up and whoopin' and then tried to plan for other work for the whole vacation and then felt overwhelmed and then decided to do nothing since it was vacation and now my immune system is compromised enough from work/stress that now my allergies and/or a cold (see above) have finally kicked in. Even Mel(ody) was so disgusted with my rolling around in exhaustion that she went up to Brutha Drain's last night to watch the Cowboys game. (It was only on satellite TV so I listened to it here on the old dairy barn radio.) It was quite the thriller.

If I had anything else to say I would say it. But I don't. So there it is.

Goodbye.  

You get the idea. Maybe. (Or maybe not.) Who cares! I'm on vacation until next year, baby!

My God. I almost can't believe it: I'm on three weeks of vacation. This is like the first vacation kind of vacation and/or time I've taken off that will be worth a damn since I moved out of the English department. Every other time I've taken off either there was all kinds of work being left half-finished waiting impatiently for me or I would be so sick and/or worn out that the time off wasn't worth the hassle. But, this semester, finally, we got our work done exactly on schedule and the rest of the crew is back at the office working busily for the next week and a half. There it is. I was just screaming at the top of my lungs cranking Witch up on the G-Mobile's stereo as I left the campus. I mean, why can't leaving at five o'clock every day be like that? It seems like it ought to be able to be that way. But it's just not. Before I left I gave the various cacti that Mel(ody) had potted to various folks. The DS (Departmental Secretary) was kind enough to get me a 20-pack of Bud Light. Now those are the kind of people you like to have work for you! 

Then, my buddy who just got shitcanned by the school came by the house last night. He had finally been let back in to his old office and was able to get his stuff out. We bought him dinner and he crashed here until taking off to Paris, TX, this morning. Who knows what's going to happen to that poor bastard? 

I brought tons of new publishing books home to read over the break. I have several internet marketing books but the best one so far is called something like The Web-Savvy Writer. Basically, Mel(ody) and I were talking this week and now that I've gone through all aspects of book publishing from beginning to end and am getting a handle on the business/marketing end, I think I'm finally ready to start my own small publishing company. Knowing what I've figured out, I think we can get the company, its Web site, e-commerce site, other odds and ends of organization stuff and a book published for between $1000 and $1500. The first main thing--and Mel(ody) and I have been kicking this around amongst ourselves and a few other folks--is to find some content to publish that we can really get behind. She has an idea for a supplemental reader for her history classes that would probably instantly break even. I'm wanting to publish post-apocalyptic stories of despair, loss and . . . more loss. Plus, at Books-A-Milion today, I bought a copy of Starting a Small Business in an edition which is, happily, specific to our state. After the lawn mowing service catastrophe, I have a great desire to never pay a goddamn $4,000 tax lien to the State (or anyone else) ever again. Man, that was a serious case of the dumbass.